10th February 2012 Archive

Windows boss Stephen Sinofsky has ended months of speculation with the first (fairly) detailed drilldown into Windows 8 on ARM (WOA) platform, and says it should be ready for a simultaneous launch with its x86/64 counterpart.

Relational database juggernaut Oracle has embedded the R programming language used by more than 2 million statisticians and quants the world over into its 11g relational database. Call it R-acle 11g, Quant Edition.

The DM2350D is the first 3D combination monitor/TV released by LG. Sharing the same passive FPR 3D panel technology as its Cinema 3D TV siblings, it’s presumably aimed at wannabe 3D PC gamers and those looking for a jack of all trades screen that’s easy to accommodate in student digs or wherever.

The Metropolitan police has requested Oyster card data relating to citizens and other personal information from Transport for London (TfL) more than 22,000 times since 2008, according to figures published by the capital's transport authority.

Three former ministers in the Indian state of Karnataka have until Monday to explain themselves to the Speaker of the local assembly after they were allegedly caught watching porn on a mobile phone during a debate in the House.

When it come to compact system cameras, Pentax has form, if your memory goes back far enough. Like the Auto110 SLR film camera of old, the Pentax Q is laughably small, but in a good way. It’s a happy laugh – like a friendly chuckle at the burblings of a new-born. Its design is achingly cute – especially the white version I received for review – while build quality is impressively and surprisingly high.

Even as offline retailers and other traditional "brick-and-mortar" businesses struggle to build their businesses online, some of technology's biggest online denizens are looking for ways to go offline. Google is the latest, reportedly opening a store in Dublin, Ireland, to sell branded merchandise, but it's just the latest in a group that includes eBay and even Amazon.

EnterpriseDB is trying to pump up the PostgreSQL database to do battle with Oracle 11g and, to a lesser extent, IBM's DB2 and Microsoft's SQL. So the database upstart is upgrading its Postgres Plus Advanced Server 9.1 - and kicking it onto Amazon's EC2 compute cloud to peddle it alongside Amazon's own Relational Database Service.

With all this EMC Lightning kerfuffle and Dell, HDS and NetApp joining in – with HP pointedly saying "No comment" like we really believe it's not playing too – there's a Big Blue elephant we're not hearing or seeing. Don't worry, IBM definitely has skin in this game – and it's called eXFlash.